Second Nature: How Europe Fell For The Natural World with Dr Belinda Scerri

"Such a profusion of rich China and Japan that I could almost fancy myself in Peking."

So wrote Lady Beauchamp Proctor in 1772, on being shown a bedchamber at Osterley House. She was in Middlesex. The eighteenth century had brought the world indoors.

In the great houses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the most fashionable rooms didn't overlook nature; they were nature. Carved wooden wall panels bloomed with botanically precise roses and tropical shells from distant seas. Silk curtains cascaded with flowers accurate enough to identify by species. Porcelain surfaces glowed with birds painted from natural history folios. Floors were inlaid with pictures in rosewood, satinwood, and mahogany - timbers from Caribbean plantations. It was engineered into the serpentine lakes of English country-house parks and marshalled into the legendary pleasure gardens of Versailles. From carved boiserie to printed Indian cotton, from the grandest royal garden in Europe to the private dressing rooms of fashionable collectors, nature was not merely a subject: it was a total environment - designed, curated, and above all possessed.

This talk traces the transformation of nature in European art and interior decoration between 1650 and 1800: how religious symbolism yielded to pure aesthetic pleasure; how design crossed continents and centuries; and how the women who commissioned, collected, and - less often remembered - made these beautiful objects shaped the visual world we inhabit today.

Dr Belinda Scerri teaches Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines ornament and interior decoration in early eighteenth-century France. Belinda is a fellow of the Centre of Visual Arts and of the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies. This research will feature in Bloomsbury Academic’s 2026 publication A Cultural History of the Environment.

Your ticket includes tea or Market Lane coffee served before the presentation, and time to browse our exclusive range of books, gifts, and homewares at TJC Emporium.

This event is presented on-site at The Johnston Collection. Please see your ticket for details. NOTE: Tickets for this event do not include access to our house museum, Fairhall. Guided tours of the current exhibition can be booked separately.

This event is supported by The Colin Holden Charitable Trust.

Image: Maria Sibylla Merian, Pineapple and examples of five insects, c.1701-1705.